


any consolation

by watfordbird33



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Anorexia, Arizona - Freeform, Bel Canto Spoilers, Eating Disorders, F/M, Illnesses, Parental!Baze, Parental!Chirrut, Running Away, Seattle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-01 22:17:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11495859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watfordbird33/pseuds/watfordbird33
Summary: She flees Arizona because there isn't much of her left, and somewhere under the shade she's pulled over her own eyes, she can see her bird-bones, clear as day. It turns out that--in Seattle, under the big maple where she used to climb--Cass Andor can see them too.





	any consolation

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE be aware of your own limits and triggers. This fic contains semi-graphic description of anorexia, self-harmful thoughts, language, sexual content, and a lot of hurt.

He’s waiting in arrivals when she steps off the plane. It’s been so long that she doesn’t recognize him, at first. Not until he moves forward with that look in his eye she’s so accustomed to.

She looks at him. Neither of them blink.

“You cut your hair,” she says, and his jaw works.

Did he expect her to cry? To fling herself into his arms?

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess I did.”

 

Later, in his car, she reaches out and ruffles her hand through it. Shorter curls. She can feel the static of them against her fingertips.

“Do you like it?” he asks her. A little nervous--she’s not sure why. He’s sitting as he always has, slumped a bit in the shoulders, elbow on the door. There’s a permanent tan on his outer forearm where the sun bites on long rides.

“It’s new,” she says.

She’s not sure what else to say.

“I hate it,” he tells her, “if that’s any consolation.”

“I just--”

She pauses to collect her thoughts. He’s looking at her (eyes on the  _ road,  _ Cass), and out of the corner of her eye she can see that crease of worry in his brow. It’s even more familiar than his smile. He hasn’t smiled, yet.

“You know,” she says, because he does; “you know how it is. I wanted everything to stay the same.”

“Maybe I’m the same,” he suggests, “other than the haircut, and you’re the different one.”

“I’m not dumb. I know it’s that, too.”

This time, he keeps his eyes on the road. But he does reach out a sunburned hand, over the center console, onto her thigh. She takes it without thinking about it. She always does.

 

Baze and Chirrut buy them dim sum in the International District. Chirrut eats daintily. He’s frailer than Jyn remembers, and it scares her. She doesn’t think anymore that she’s the only one who’s changed.

“Hungry?” Baze says, in that sort of way that means,  _ Eat. _

“Not really,” Jyn says. She shrugs a bit, to offset it. “Jetlag.”

The truth is that she’s roiling just at the thought of the pork buns and the sesame balls, and her stomach just about turns itself over when they bring out Cass’s favorite shrimp. Jetlag has nothing to do with it, and they all know this. They say nothing regardless.

 

“You’re very thin,” Cass says. 

She’s on his bed with her feet up, reading  _ Bel Canto  _ and crying a little at it, silently. She has never failed to cry when reading  _ Bel Canto. _ It’s a good excuse to ignore Cass’s pointed observation.

“I thought you were pregnant, maybe.”

She almost laughs.

“You’re too smart for that, though.”

She wants to tell him that it is not a question of being smart, and who the fuck does he think he is, assuming these things about her? Maybe she is the type of girl who’d fly out to Arizona and let herself get pregnant by some ASU football star.

“We missed you,” Cass says. He doesn’t look at her. He looks at his computer keyboard. There is probably a lovely complicated spindle of code spooling itself out within the machine. Cass’s version of therapy. “I mean,  _ I _ missed you. I missed you so much.”

She says nothing, still. What is she waiting for? She can’t remember.

“Jyn,” he says, and his voice breaks just a little. Just the smallest bit. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“You know how it is,” she tells him. 

Her voice is steadier than she thought it would be. It’s always, You know how it is.

“You’re not okay,” he guesses.

“Have I ever been okay?”

He stabs at the keyboard. “You used to be in the okayest thing in my life, Jyn. Every single fucking day.”

She doesn’t answer. It would be a sin to raise his hopes or drop them. Instead, she reads the same sentence of  _ Bel Canto,  _ over and over. The terrorists are falling one by one and forever. It’s only then that they become not so bad after all.

 

She can’t sleep. She doesn’t mean to end up in his room.

He turns over without a word, without even opening his eyes, and she slides under the covers beside him and turns so her face is pressed into his back. He smells like Cass. She thinks he might be crying, silently, the way she did before.

She still cannot fall asleep.

 

Morning, and Baze wakes them, apologetically. Chirrut has an appointment in Shoreline. They’ll be alone.

Once this would have been an excuse to play hide-and-seek and fall kissing and touching when they found each other; an excuse to climb as high as they could, daringly, up the maple in the backyard; an excuse to sit and drink bubbly wine in Cass’s room with all the lights off. Now it’s like a big handful of unsaid things that have all been shoved into Jyn’s arms. It’s her job to dispose of them. She’s not entirely sure how she will.

They end up in the kitchen, and Cass makes them tea.

“What is this?” she asks him.

“Mango passionfruit,” he says, and winks at her on  _ passionfruit _ so she almost-- _ almost _ \--smiles. “Chirrut’s.”

“How absurd,” she says, but drinks it anyway. It’s predictably terrible. She takes tiny scalding sips of it until she can feel the ache in her stomach subside, a bit. She hasn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning. A couple of orange slices in the Arizona terminal.

Cass makes her toast.

“I can’t,” she says. He’s looking for an excuse so she adds, again, “Jetlag.”

He says, “You’re like a rail. Eat something, love.”

He wants a reaction, with  _ love _ . He wants to make her smile. Or maybe throw a punch. She will not give him the satisfaction of a response.

“I’m not hungry,” she says instead.

“Bullshit.”

“I’m  _ not. _ ”

The tea has fooled her stomach. It’s not a lie.

Cass puts his hand on her shoulder. His palm can cover the whole thing. She does not remember him being so  _ solid _ , so irreplaceably strong and Cass.

“Don’t touch me,” she tells him, though she was the one who found solace against him yesterday.

He removes his hand.

“I’ll make some more tea,” he says, quietly.

 

Afterwards, she unpacks. She sits on the floor and sorts clothes into piles of clean and dirty, clean and dirty, the repetition comforting. He folds her socks for her, though she didn’t ask him to.

“Chirrut is sick,” he says, halfway through.

“I know,” she acknowledges. She does. She just hasn’t let herself say it yet.

“He’ll get better, though.”

Cass is not one for false hope. She believes him.

“Is it very bad?” she asks him.

He shrugs. “He’ll get better. He has to.”

She cannot picture the little Seattle house without Chirrut. She cannot picture Baze without Chirrut. She cannot picture  _ herself  _ without Chirrut.

She folds a T-shirt excruciatingly neat so she’ll stop thinking about Chirrut’s bird bones and his fragile smile. The shirt is one of Cass’s. She puts her face against it to smell the Cass in it. 

“Does it smell like me?” he asks her, and there it is--his first smile.

“Just a little,” she says, and she can’t help it. She smiles, too.

 

That night, when she comes into his room, he’s already cleared a space for her. The mattress no longer sags under their combined weight.

 

“What are you doing to yourself?” Chirrut asks her softly, perhaps a week later. They’re on the back porch, Jyn holding Chirrut’s hand and watching an owl in the maple, high above. Baze and Cass are playing with a stomp-rocket they found in the garage.

“What?” Jyn says, even though she knows exactly what he means.

Chirrut says, “Oh, stardust.”

“I’m okay,” Jyn informs him, and then, to cement it: “Nothing’s wrong.”

Chirrut’s mouth curves, wry. “How far would you be able to launch that rocket, love?”

All this  _ love.  _ It’s making her uncomfortable. She doesn’t know why it didn’t, before. She is no one’s love. Not even her own.

(Once, here, she wrote  _ I hate myself  _ in the little black book she keeps by her bedside. Then she scribbled it out, very quickly.)

She wonders if perhaps Chirrut is right.

 

The eighth night she can’t sleep, Cass turns over to face her. They can both hear her stomach growling. She knows this.

He tries to kiss her, and she pushes him away.

“Can’t you see?” she says, getting out of bed. It is not urgent; it is not a scramble. He is a gentleman, just one who happens to be delusional. “I’ll burn you up, Cass. I’ll fucking break you. Don’t you know that by now?”

She goes back to her room and turns the radio on. It’s the indie channel he loves. She changes it to jazz.

 

Here is a secret she has never told anyone: in Arizona, she used to fall asleep to Cass’s voicemails, every night. They were all very plaintive and angsty and sometimes a little bit drunk. She didn’t listen to the content. She just listened to his voice.

The ninth night she can’t sleep, instead of going to his room, she puts her earbuds in and presses her cheek against the pillow and listens to his latest voicemail. He calls her  _ love.  _ And then,  _ my love.  _ In English. In Spanish. Twice. This was six months ago. The last one he left.

In the morning, she looks at herself in the mirror. There was a cup of mango passionfruit tea left outside her door, and she drinks it. In the mirror, the knob of her throat, swallowing, is overlarge. Her bones are Chirrut’s: bird bones.

 

“Want a walk?”

Cass appears at her door. He looks shadowed. Maybe he hasn’t been sleeping, either.

“As long as you don’t try anything,” she says.

He says, “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”

She’s wearing track shorts that used to be tight on her. Her shoes still fit. Black high-top Converse. Cass wrote his name all over the toes. She grabs a sweatshirt--overlarge to begin with, ASU-stamped--and follows him out, down the hall, down the steps.

They walk for a long time before either of them speaks. 

“You--” she says finally, and then breaks off, because he’s talking, too.

He says, “No, you go on.”

“I was just going to say. It’s not your fault. I hope you know that.”

He points to her ribs. Concave.  _ “This _ is not my fault? Or Arizona? Or the kiss?”

She covers her breasts with her arms. Her eyes are stinging. “Any of it. All of it. It’s me.”

“It’s not,” he says, gentle; “ _ Jyn.  _ Sometimes things happen that are bigger than us. Bigger than any of us.”

“Why?” she says, stopping, and she says it like a child. 

“I don’t know, love. I wish I did.”

“Help me,” she says, and the words release a dam. She doesn’t know why. She’s kinetic force, now, rampant river. Set loose upon the world. Jyn Erso and all her pieces. Hollowed-out ribs and ASU sweatshirts and crying at _ Bel Canto  _ and listening to voicemails on repeat for hours until she falls asleep.  “Help me, Cass,” she says. “Get me out. Drag me up.”

He isn’t crying. She isn’t, either. He puts his arms around her and he pulls her up.

 

Later, he sits with her in the warm checkerboard kitchen and watches her eat toast. She can feel herself eating like Chirrut, in nibbles instead of bites. For a second, it disgusts her. This man, watching her chew. She is a glutton. She is worthless. She does not deserve this.

Cass puts his hand over hers.

“Okay?” he says.

She takes another bite.

 

Soup, next. Small sips of it. She burns the book by her bedside.

She is not jetlagged.

She would not have moved the stomp-rocket even half as far as Cass.

 

The twenty-first day she can’t sleep, he’s not in his bed. He’s writing code. She can see it from the doorway, where she stands with a muffin and another cup of tea. Spirals of it, loops of brackets and double slashes and numbers in complex swirls.

She gets  _ Bel Canto  _ from his shelf. She reads and rereads Gen and Carmen in the china closet until Cass powers his monitor off and comes to sit beside her, on the bed.

“Did I ever kiss you in a china closet?” he says. 

She knows he’s smiling; she can feel it against her neck. Perhaps he knows what’s coming. She’s not even really entirely sure of what’s coming. All she knows is that she is out of Arizona. She is home.

She never cries, at this part of  _ Bel Canto. _

“Everywhere but,” she whispers back.

“Why’d we stop?”

“Sometimes things happen that are bigger than us.”

He kisses her.

“--bigger than any of us,” she says, when they come up for air.

“I love you, Jyn.”

“I know.”

He bites her jaw, and says, “I always have.”

 

The rest is a slow remembering of what they used to be. She is not the way he recalls her. She knows this. He has to navigate her sunken ribs all over again, though they’re fuller than they were.

The muffin plate and teacup and  _ Bel Canto  _ get caught up in the sheets somewhere. She’ll find them in the morning, and she and Cass will laugh, because that was the hard bit of glass pressing into Cass’s bare thigh: the crumbs Jyn found between her breasts. How awkward and lovely and messy and unique. As they all are. As they have always been.

She tells him Arizona’s too hot for her anyway.


End file.
